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I started a hyves on the 17th of January at the ‘Meet the Expert — and make your own Hyves profile’ workshop organised by the NVB HB/WB. The expert in this case was Martijn Hulst (adviseur zorgmarketing bij Twynstra Gudde). You can read what he talked about that day in his blog. Martijn uses Slideshare to share the presentations he’s made. Here’s the presentation he gave us at the workshop.

Martijn Hulst gave us a very enthousiatic account of all the software he uses in his job encouraging health care workers to network and exchange information. He gave us a mind boggling list of web 2.0 applications, examples of use in practice and statistics on the groups that use them.

He’d been talking for one and a half hours before we broke for coffee, and had spoken for another three quarters of an hour after the break…Just as I was thinking – ‘gee I’ll never find the time to try this stuff out’ he announced that he was at the end of his presentation and that we could all start practicing by starting up our own Hyves.

I’d come prepared with a bit of text about me for the profile, a photo taken by holding the camera at arms length (and a little too low according to Bonny because you can see up my nostrils) and the only film I have – taken by Bonny with my camera at the Natural History Museum in London and featuring me and a T-rex.

I had my Hyves up within a half an hour which I was pretty proud of until I came home and showed it to Bonny. “You’ve got a Hyves but zero friends” was her comment”, followed by “Change that photo, I can see up your nostrils”. So of course I spent the next week asking people to join my Hyves, changing my colour scheme, adding stuff to my profile, and browsing YouTube for movies to link to my Hyves, oh and I added ‘Pac-man’. I’ve kept the photo because I quite like the way it looks down into the page, anyway everyone has nostrils.

The whole exercise has been fun and I have a deeper understanding of why every second computer screen in the library shows Hyves. Unfortunately I’m supposed to be thinking of ways to use social software ‘seriously’ to link into the communication channels of the younger generation, maybe I will, but for now it’s a playground. If you’d like to play too, just click on the ‘add to friends’ link underneath my photo.

LinkedIn is another type of social network, one in which you can keep track of professional contacts. I was invited to join a little while back by a SPOETNIK contact. I haven’t done much with LinkedIn, except to provide a short profile to get started. I can see how it could be handy for advertising your expertise, searching for new staff, targeting people for invitations to seminars etc etc. You can invite people to join your network by uploading contacts from your e-mail accounts. To invite other SPOETNIKers, the easiest way is to upload your gmail contacts using the accounts on the deelnemers page.